Unspeakable Language of Revisionary Myth in The Love of the Nightingale

Abstract

Timberlake Wertenbaker is one of the most important female playwrights in the contemporary British theatre. She has published twenty-three plays and she is very sensitive to language. She always focus on the relation between language and identity to care for the women who are silenced and forbidden to show their emotion and opinions. In addition, Wertenbaker often recreates the plays which are based on the history material, myth, and fairy tale in order to reconstruct the past, to criticize the present. During the revision, texts and characters can interact and generate the new issue in order to change the accepted sexual norms in the past. In this paper, I use The Love of the Nightingale to be an example to elaborate how Wertenbaker recreate the myth and female figures struggle against the male violence. Next, in this play, there are several unspeakable behavior between the characters which show the problem of women’s suffering and the loss of language. However, through their suffering, Wertenbaker reshapes the stereotype images of silenced women to be the people who are aware of their language and emotion. In the conclusion, this revising myth for women give the oral history play a whole new illustration which stimulates readers to actively reconsider old myth. Wertenbaker intends to let the reader aware their importance as an audience who also joins the play and allow her myth to be told and revised continuously by the reader.